Expo '70 Canadian Government Pavilion

Osaka, Japan
Designed in 1969 with Geoffrey Massey
Graphic Art for rotating "spinners" by Gordon Smith
This project was the result of a two stage national competition. Something of the generosity, starkness, and simplicity of the
Canadian landscape is suggested by the four towering volumes around a central courtyard. From the exterior, the
anticipation of the central court is made more intriguing by the narrowness of the four openings into it and by the glimpses of
colour and movement inside.
From the outside, the leaning forms have a mountainous scale. To lighten the forms and create an ambiguity and double
sense so much part of Japanese aesthetics, the exterior surfaces are sheathed in mirrors, sloped at 45 degrees for a true
reflection of the sky.
From a country where the sky is often the most telling feature of the landscape, this brings to a country which almost ignores
the sky in its aesthetic preoccupation with the earth, some sense of the breadth and openness of the Canadian landscape.
The roof over the performance stage in the courtyard is not a fixed, stationary roof but rather a kinetic one composed of five
"spinners" that revolve slowly and compose and recompose a kaleidoscopic pattern high in the sky- reflected in the mirrors
around, in the mirrored shafts supporting the spinners, and in the water surface of the pool in which they stand.
The courtyard is visually a cool and serene refuge from the fairgrounds- a pool in which the stage floats and over which the
spinners rotate slowly and noiselessly. Illusion and reality are so subtly intertwined that it is difficult to perceive which is
which or where the edge of one begins and the other ends.
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